Around April of this year my friend gave me a book called \u2018The Uncertainty of Hope\u2019 by a Zimbabwean author Valerie Tagwira. To be honest with you I was a bit reluctant to read at first because the cover was ugly and because I had never sat down to read anything by an \u2018unknown\u2019<\/em> African author; I was more into the widely recognised novels by Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie, which had been given the seal of approval by the literature gate-keeper. After contemplating about reading it and never getting round to it, I returned it but the owner insisted I keep it for as long as I needed. Good thing I did though, because the day I finally decided to pick the book up, I did not put it down until all 363 pages were thoroughly read!
\nWhat an enlightening and emotional journey that was. To put it in Fungai Machirori\u2019s words:<\/p>\n

\u2018Many passages in this 363-page journey had my skin swelling up in goose bumps because yes, here is a woman who speaks about the things we are not often too ready to acknowledge, and therefore address.\u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

While reading this book I came across the concept of \u2018small houses\u2019 ; Onai\u2019s husband Gari has a small house called Gloria whose former partner dies of AIDS. Onai\u2019s reaction, when she learns about her husband\u2019s infidelity is one that shocks me and probably prompted me to write this article. She asks herself, \u2018How could he be so irresponsible?\u2019 as if it would have been responsible of him to deal with a woman who was not known in the neighbourhood for being a prostitute. She then tells herself that she can do nothing but accept whatever life pitched at her. Then we learn about Melody, a university student who sleeps with a married man to pay for her university fees. Later on in the book when she is confronted by this man\u2019s wife who is a nurse in London, the anger she feels is not that she has been found out but rather that the money he has been spending on her was his wife\u2019s hard- earned salary. I wished that these two women \u2013 who were different but similar in many ways – could have handled their predicament better.<\/p>\n

Small houses are being hunted down by HIV\/AIDS organisations in Zimbabwe because they are thought to be one of the key drivers in the epidemic that continues to claim lives of thousands of people. Adultery is no longer a three-way thing; it is now a complex web of risks. I will use an example to explain this point; John is married but he is having an affair with a HIV-positive work colleague who has casual sex with her driver who is a nymphomaniac and sleeps with at least four different people a month, some of them are married but are \u2018experiencing\u2019 what is out there, and their partners have maybe sampled the greener pastures once or twice to prove Maya\u2019s point; \u2018when you\u2019re out in the club don\u2019t think I\u2019m not.\u2019<\/em> The connection does not stop there; you can just keep adding more people and just watch the HIV virus spread like wildfire. I can hear you ask, what ever happened to using condoms? Well listen to this, a friend of mine once told me that as she waited in a hospital waiting room in a local hospital somewhere in Africa, she was approached by a nurse who said to her that young people were lucky because they had the freedom to use condoms whenever they felt like it. Married men or women on the other hand could not tell their partners that they wanted to have sex with a condom. It was an abomination \u2013 one that the village elders could hear about. Exaggeration! But on a serious note, many women have received a beating for suggesting such!<\/p>\n

I cannot tell anybody that marriage values seem to have vanished in today\u2019s society because I have yet to walk down the aisle. I am with the view that a marriage should be about two people from the beginning until death do them part, but it would also be naive of me to believe that affairs are things that only happen to other people or that only my husband is capable of contemplating adultery. This book has forced me to re-evaluate my opinion on the much open relationships and polygamy – still practiced in several African countries.<\/p>\n